Remarkable progress has been made in recent medical appliances by virtue of the development of electronic technology, and there are various instruments used for diagnosis of diseases and health.
The pulsimeter is one of the instruments used for such a purpose, and there are many prior proposals related to pulsimeters. The pulse frequency generally varies every moment, and a method for accurate measurement of pulse frequency over a short time is the crux of the problems with pulsimeters. For this purpose, cycle conversion methods are generally employed in which the time of the pulse cycle of pulsation signals is measured to convert the measured value into pulse frequency per minute. This method still has a problem of data reliability due to variance in sampling data, and methods of decreasing the degree of the variance in data by comparing the variance with the reference value are proposed in the Japanese patent laid open No. 61-209634 (S. Ichikawa) and others. A method of obtaining mean values accurately and in a short amount of time by arithmetic processing of pulsation values in time sequence is proposed in the Japanese patent laid open No. 64-49538 (Y. Jikiba).
All of these prior proposals relate to the pulsimeter itself, and the general lay public with no medical knowledge finds it extremely difficult to judge health conditions directly using the measured values.
An instrument for measuring the degree of improvement in physical strength obtained by exercising is therefore proposed in the Japanese patent laid open No. 62-53633 (H. Fujii), wherein a device is added to a pulsimeter which measures the time required for recovery to the normal pulse frequency after exercise by pre-setting the normal pulse frequency of the user in the pulsimeter. The Fujii proposal intends to measure the person's physical strength by the time required for recovery of the pulse frequency which has increased because of exercise, the object of which is different from that of the present invention which displays his health condition by comparison with the person's past historical data.
What is more, an instrument which measures the health condition by the judgment of pulse wave speed is available on the market, but it is too expensive and unsuitable for personal use.
It is difficult to measure the condition of health of humans and display it precisely. This is so because no appropriate criteria are available up to the present which can precisely represent the health condition of people, and the only appropriate way is collective judgment by specialists from body temperature, pulse electrocardiogram, etc.